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			<h1>Learning journals</h1>
			<p>Day 00652: Sunday, 2016 December 18</p>
		</header>
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/12/18.jpg" alt="False cedar branches encased in ice" class="weblog-header-image" width="809" height="480" />
<h2 id="advertisements">Unsponsored advertisements</h2>
<p>
	I was reminded today that one of my coworkers likes <a href="http://www.bradsucks.net./">Brad Sucks</a>&apos; music.
	A couple years or so ago, they heard me playing it and liked it.
	There are reasons that I exclusively play free music, and this is one of them.
	I shouldn&apos;t accidentally lead people to discover new proprietary artist that they like, driving business to those proprietary artists.
	Instead, I should accidentally help people discover new <strong>*free*</strong> artists that they like, driving business to those artists instead.
</p>
<h2 id="general">General news</h2>
<p>
	I finished hand-washing that load of laundry from yesterday, then hung it to dry.
</p>
<p>
	My mother is still being a control freak and threatens to kick me out now if I cut my hair.
	However, it&apos;s been hanging in my eyes for weeks, painfully poking me in the eyes.
	It doesn&apos;t affect me here at home, as I wear a hat to cover my stupid-looking hair, but at work, it poses a real problem.
	I work in the food industry, so I can&apos;t keep brushing my hair out of my eyes.
	That would be unsanitary.
	I&apos;m also not allowed to wear my own hat there, as we&apos;re only allowed to wear company hats.
	I&apos;ve asked them for one of the company hats, but I think that they&apos;ve forgotten about it.
	Likewise, whenever new hats come in, a couple of employees grab them all, despite still having all the hats from before, leaving the rest of us with none.
	I&apos;ve considered wearing a headband like one of the shift leaders, but I&apos;d be accused of emulating that shift leader.
	Feelings about that shift leader are mixed, and I don&apos;t want to get into that.
	Last night on the way home though, I bought some small hair clips.
	I&apos;m tired of dealing with this stupid hair and I can&apos;t wait to move out and trim it, but for now, these clips provided some much-needed relief.
</p>
<p>
	I spent the first part of the work day a bit self-conscious because many people consider hair clips to be feminine garb.
	However, this is moronic.
	There&apos;s no reason why any article of clothing or accessory should be considered to be inherently masculine or inherently feminine unless that article of clothing relates to some anatomy not shared by the sexes.
	For example, it seems reasonable to consider a bra to be a piece of womens&apos; clothing because men tend to not have large enough breasts to need one.
	In any case, I fairly quickly got over it both because I&apos;m not trying to attract a mate and don&apos;t need to appear masculine, as well as because of how much improvement the clips offered.
	The work day was pleasant and I didn&apos;t have hair poking me in the eyes.
	Near the end of the day, one coworker even commented on them saying that the clips looked nice.
</p>
<p>
	Today, I didn&apos;t have a closing shift, so I feared that I&apos;d be flattening pizza dough all day.
	Instead, I was the &quot;floater&quot;, drifting to whatever station required assistance at the moment.
	That made it very much like a morning shift for me, as in the morning, we also drift between stations.
	I didn&apos;t even need to go near the dough-flattening station until it was time to clean the machine and get it ready for tomorrow&apos;s morning crew.
</p>
<p>
	To blow off some steam, I wrote up a short article on <a href="/en/opinion/misuse_of_words.xhtml">misused words in English</a>.
	I&apos;ll add to it as I come up with more examples.
	It&apos;s sad that my first opinionative page on the website is about something as stupid as misused English words, but it was something that didn&apos;t take a lot of time to write or any research whatsoever.
	There isn&apos;t anything that needs facts that can be found outside basic intuition.
	Someday, I&apos;ll have time to write pieces that actually matter.
</p>
<p>
	The ice was on heavy decline yesterday, so I thought that it&apos;d be gone by today.
	However, the cold has set back in, so the remaining ice seems to be here to stay for a while.
	In some places, small bushes are frozen on one side, but completely thawed on the other side, ostensibly the side that got more sun yesterday.
</p>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
<h2 id="university">University life</h2>
<p>
	I wrote up the discussion post for the week, which was due today.
	It was a fairly easy topic to discuss, unlike some past discussion assignment topics, so I was able to hammer it out quickly and move on to the next order of business:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
	Goals and objectives give managers a way to control their respective organizations by giving themselves and their employees a target to shoot for.
	Often times when there&apos;s a lack of control in an organization, it&apos;s not because the employees are rejecting the ideals of the leadership.
	It&apos;s because the employees either don&apos;t understand what needs to be done or because there&apos;s no clear path to get to the final product.
	With goals and objectives, employees know what they need to get done, often times as well as how and by when.
</p>
<p>
	When goals are specific and measurable, it improves employee performance (and therefore organizational performance) for a couple reasons.
	First, it gives managers a way to objectively tell when an employee isn&apos;t performing well, as well as specific feedback to provide to poorly-performing employees.
	Perhaps more importantly though, it gives <strong>*employees themselves*</strong> a target to shoot for and potentially do better than.
	Without a target, it can be very difficult to perform well because you can&apos;t measure your performance in any meaningful way.
</p>
<p>
	I don&apos;t work in management, as I&apos;m a computer science student, not a business student.
	Additionally, I&apos;m only in a temporary fast-food job right now, and those of us at my restaurant that aren&apos;t in management don&apos;t see a lot of the control mechanisms directly.
	We&apos;re simply told to work, in an assembly-line-like fashion, on a single part of the finished product for most of our shifts.
	As such, I don&apos;t have a whole lot of examples that I can draw from personal experience.
	However, I have noticed the labor-hours-to-profit ratio goals that my bosses deal with.
	When business is heavy, they can get away with calling in more people, which is what we need to keep up with all the customers, while still keeping the ratio low enough.
	However, when business is slow, the managers send people home.
	Additionally, sometimes mistakes in management happen, and the ratio gets too high.
	It only takes one bad day to mess up the weekly ratio.
	While rare, we have to make up for it to get our weekly ratio low enough.
	When this happens, management is very careful about who they keep and who the send home, calling off any slow workers and keeping those of us that are known to work above and beyond expectations, then pushing us to be as productive as feasible without overworking us.
	By using these labor-hour-to-profit ratio goals as a vital control mechanism, management is able to keep profits high while keeping costs lower then they otherwise would be.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
	After that, I took the ungraded and graded quizzes for the week.
	I really sucked on the graded quiz.
	Worst of all, the test provides no indication of which questions that I answered correctly ans which I answered incorrectly.
	It tells me that I suck at this course, but doesn&apos;t provide me with any information needed to improve myself.
	I don&apos;t know where I need to spend more time studying and where I&apos;m already doing fine.
</p>
<p>
	This week&apos;s learning journal assignment requires that we reference our submissions for a couple learning journal assignments from previous weeks.
	It would be <strong>*very*</strong> nice to be able to link back to archived copies those assignments without linking directly to my journal pages from the days in which I completed those assignments.
	Linking back to full journal entries instead of just the learning journal entries would be sloppy and unprofessional.
	I never thought that I&apos;d actually have a use for being able to directly reference them, so I just included them in my main journal, but today, I corrected that.
	The learning journal of each course now has its own separate page, though the separate entries do not.
	Instead, they can just be referenced via <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> fragment components.
	With preparations out of the way, I&apos;ll be ready tomorrow to begin my learning journal submission for the week, assuming that I don&apos;t instead try to get somewhere with my essay.
</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/en/coursework/BUS1101/">BUS 1101: Principles of Business Management</a></li>
<li><a href="/en/coursework/POLS1503/">POLS 1503: Globalization</a></li>
<li><a href="/en/coursework/UNIV1001/">UNIV 1001: Online Education Strategies</a></li>
</ul>
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